Control your phone from Google Talk with Tasker, AutoRemote, and Zapier

Zapier is an IFTTT.com-like service that ties together services on a “if this, then that”-basis, allowing you to bridge various online services together in new and powerful ways. It sounds great, but the problem is that the service is priced so beyond common sense that I dreaded getting involved with it in the first place. If you go over the very limited use you get on the free account, there’s no pricing option before $15/month. I would think twice about paying $15/year for what Zapier offers, which is why the service is very far from being on my good side. Unfortunately I can’t afford to ignore all the consumer-unfriendly companies out there (I wouldn’t have anything left to talk about), so here we go…

Like I said, Zapier works by tying services together. One of the supported services is our long-time favorite Tasker plugin, AutoRemote, which allows you to send message between devices. This essentially means that you can send messages to or from AutoRemote and Zapier, which in turn means that AutoRemote has a gateway to everything that Zapier supports.

Zapier is very business-oriented, with a list of supported services that reflects that. This might explain why its pricing scheme is so beyond reason when compared to other consumer-level cloud services, but it still has a wide range of more common services that it supports, like YouTube, Gmail, Google Calendar, and a ton of other things. Each supported service can have one or more triggers and actions, meaning you can tie together services like “New video on YouTube” and “Send Gmail message.”

As you can imagine, there are lots of ways this can be used with AutoRemote. You can have an incoming message trigger something, or you can have another service trigger an AutoRemote message. I have two instances of the former, mentioned in my post about sending push notifications to iOS from Android.

The final of my three active “zaps” goes the other way, and ties Google Talk messages to AutoRemote messages. The way this works is that you add your Google Talk account to Zapier using the instructions provided. You then get a Zapier bot as a contact in Google Talk, and anything you tell this bot can be used in Zapier. After setting up AutoRemote in Zapier (following the provided instructions), you can then create a pair where any messages sent to the Zapier bot are forwarded to AutoRemote as a message. You can filter these messages, or you can just forward the entire message.

Forwarding the entire message has one major advantage: all your existing AutoRemote commands will work. You can find a guide to using AutoRemote here, and using it with Zapier is just like using it with another Android device. For instance, I have multiple AutoRemote commands I use regularly from other devices, including “copy=:=X” (copies X to my phone’s clipboard) and “todo Y=:=X” (adds X to todo list Y on my phone). With a bridge set up between Google Talk and AutoRemote, I simply type the commands into the chat window for the bot on my computer, and off we go. I tend to use it mostly for the to-do list feature, adding things to my to-do lists from my computer. I’ve been able to do that from Chrome before, but this is easier.

The downside of this is, like I said, Zapier’s stupid pricing schemes. With a free account, you get 5 “zaps” (service pairs) and 100 performed tasks every month. The latter number can be increased by spamming people in the name of Zapier (details on Zapier’s site), and since you use up one of those 100 tasks every time you send a message this way, you’re going to need it. There’s so much potential here with AutoRemote support in Zapier, but unfortunately the pricing puts a massive stopper for how many people will ever pay for it at all.

Even the $15/month level only gives you 20 “zaps,” which isn’t much if you have multiple versions of the same pair, just with different filters. If you need more than you get, you’re suddenly at a level where you pay almost as much for a service to move a few bytes of data from point A to point B as you do for combined subscriptions to Netflix and Spotify, which serve you gigabytes of licensed data each month. Sorry for the ranting, but I can’t get over how overpriced Zapier really is.

Anyway, there is at least a bit of functionality to extract from Zapier before it becomes an overly expensive ordeal, and it’s something that’s worth looking into. I only really cover Google Talk integration here, but like I said, there’s a lot of possible combinations here.

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About the Author

Andreas Ødegård was an associate editor at Pocketables. He’s more interested in aftermarket (and user created) software and hardware than chasing the latest gadgets and tends to stick with his choice of device for a long time as a result of that. Currently that includes an iPad mini and a Samsung Galaxy S II.

Raqua

Maybe I do not get it, but why do you need zapier? You can send messages to your phone by gtalk directly and (I have not checked) believe Tasker can handle those. Or you can use email … There is million of other ways how to achieve this, what is the advantage of zapier?

Andreas Ødegård

I’m not sure what you’re referring to with Tasker’s capability of reading Google Talk messages directly. Either I’ve missed something, or the closest you would get would be to sign in your phone on another account and then read the incoming notifications from messages using Tasker. The advantage of the Zapier/AutoRemote system is that the messages are silent. We’re not talking about sending messages for the sake of communication here, but for the sake of control. I won’t have unread chat messages or emails when I use my phone after sending messages this way, as it simply allows you to trigger Tasker tasks remotely without any visible “evidence”.

Raqua

Aha, ok, now I see. If I needed such a functionality, I would probably go for email and then delete it using tasker. I am not sure, if I can delete email from tasker, maybe k9 mail supports this. But custom label with gmail auto filter would work for me to not clutter my mailbox. You can set up, which labels trigger notification, maybe you could have no sound for those emails but still react on them with tasker.
But having separate email app for that would definitely work as you can dismiss notification from tasker. Or any IM app would work as well.

Wanting something more fancy, it seems from the description that this sort of functionality is directly build in Autoremote. I am not Autoremote user yet, but from reading it’s Gplay description, AutoRemote direct URL messaging seems to be the same thing you are trying to do with zapier.
This opens almost endless options now, because I can get for example Raspberry Pi and have it checking automatically my favorite website Pocketables, using bash script and wget. Once the contents changes, I can open pre-defined URL which will send message to my phone using Autoremote. Quite nice I would say.
I have to come up with some usefull stuff for this, but sounds really fun. I am tasker addict myself too. :)

Andreas Ødegård

Yeah there are other methods for doing this. The direct URL method is something I use for sending commands to my phone from my iPad. I also have the Chrome plugin for AutoRemote and can send messages from any text field in the browser. Still, using Google Talk is just a tad bit simpler and cleaner, so as long as it works with a free Zapier account, I’ll continue using it. As far as using email goes, the benefits of this method is that it utilizes the same commands that any other AutoRemote system does.

Raqua

Whatever works best for you, but I would be reluctant to use some bogus free service that can be shut down anytime. Not to mention giving them my email credentials, but separate gmail account just for this is easy to get so that is not a problem.

Andreas Ødegård

I agree, though I should point out that they’re not actually getting your email credentials. The Zapier bot is a Gtalk contact like any other, so it doesn’t have any access to you account other than it being on your contacts list. You send it messages like you send messages to other people.

Raqua

Ok then, missed that.

Marcos

My method for accomplishing easy communication with Auto Remote is through Launchy acting as a gui for curl. Works seamlessly.

While I hesitate to mention this as a solution since it isn’t officially out of beta yet (so please forgive the lack of fit and finish), I’ve been writing an app called Andre, which was born out of a desire to make a flexible universal remote (for home automation, home theater, security, PC control, etc.).

One of the features of Andre is to talk to other apps via Android intents, with interoperability with Tasker one of the main drivers of this.

Another feature of Andre is to send data and commands to the device over Google Cloud Messaging, through a free web service call to andreapp.com.

So if you have Andre installed and get it linked to an AndreApp.com account, you could set it up to control anything on the device with a web form or automated service call. There’s a free version of Andre Pro 2.0 in the market if anyone would like to dabble with this as an option. I’ll gladly help get it wired up, just drop me a line.

While obviously not quite as convenient, let’s not forget that each autoremote device has a dedicated url, that you can use to send messages directly to the device.

It certainly is more convenient than being robbed by Zapier. :-P

Raqua

I came back to report that over the weekend I managed to pull something similar to what I mentioned above on my phone.
I was on vacation and came back to find my home 4 days without electricity as the fuses went of and there was noone to put them back in order. Had I knew that, I could ask my parents to come by and fix it. So it made me thinking how I could prevent this and I come up with idea of putting my, now unused, old HTC back to service.
I got cheap SIM and used google email account / K9 mail / Tasker / Email Me Pro to hack a service that notifies me and can be comanded by email of sms. Works nice and I can not check, whether electricity works in my house (phone on charge). It also sends automated warnings if needed. I am now looking into more stuff that I can hack into it. :)